Punishment eliminates directed forgetting: an event-related potential study

This study investigated motivational effect of reward and punishment on directed forgetting using the event-related potential technique. Participants were instructed to encode two-character words in Chinese, followed by the indicator of 'remember' or 'forget'. Then, participants were required accomplishing the judgment task of old and new words. The results suggest that (i) directed forgetting effect is significant in the punishment condition but not in the reward condition, and (ii) a positive amplitude is induced in the punishment condition but not in the reward condition. Furthermore, directed forgetting can be effectively influenced by reward motivation, whereas punishment motivation is antagonistic to active forgetting because a substantial cognitive resource attracts considerable attention. Therefore, this study supports encoding inhibition theory. Correspondence to Wei Liu, PhD, Department of Psychology, Education College, Shanghai Normal University, 100 Guilin Road, Shanghai 200234, China Tel: +86 13 044 187 846; fax: +86 21 64 324 583; e-mail: liuweiubc@gmail.com or Correspondence to Junlong Luo, PhD, Department of Psychology, Education College, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai 200234, China Tel: +86 18 616 973 557; fax: +86 21 64 322 331; e-mail: luo831023@163.com Received September 22, 2017 Accepted September 30, 2017 © 2017 Wolters Kluwer Health | Lippincott Williams & Wilkins

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